The beginning of 2026 has suggested that this will be another year full of records linked to the , according to scientists and meteorological organizations. These signals range from fires across the planet to high ocean surface temperatures and low sea ice in the Arctic. And what scientists expect is a second half of the year with temperatures even higher than normal due to the appearance of The Child, which increases heat on the surface of the water in tropical areas of the Pacific, which ends up having effects throughout the globe. Several experts already point to a high probability that 2026 will close as the second – or even the first – warmest year on record on the planet. You don’t have to look back too far to find the current record: .
But, as Friederike Otto, professor of Climate Sciences at the Center for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, explains, The Child It is a “natural phenomenon that comes and goes”, but the problem is that it occurs on a dangerous basis: a global warming that is worsening and that will continue to worsen “in the meantime”. That is precisely where Otto focuses, because as this expert warns, many governments are “going backwards” in their climate objectives despite “the devastating impacts of climate change that are already being experienced.”
Fires are one of the faces of the problem. The Netherlands has experienced one this month that led the Dutch Government to request the collaboration of the European Emergency Aid Coordination Center last week, which finally sent firefighting troops from France and Germany. What happened in the heart of Europe at an unusual time of year is just a small snapshot of what has happened in the first months of 2026 in many areas of the planet. Between January 1 and May 6, more than 160 million hectares in the world have been affected by fire, which is the highest figure for that period since at least 2012, when the data from the Copernicus tool, the European Earth Observation program, began.
Theodore Keeping, a researcher also at Imperial College London and a member like Otto of the World Weather Attribution group, states that “this year the global fire season has started very quickly.” “Although in many parts of the world the fire season has not yet intensified, this rapid start, combined with the forecast of The Childimplies that we are facing an especially severe year,” adds Keeping. Taking into account the patterns of previous episodes of The Child It is likely that in the second half of the year, the dry and hot conditions that fuel fires in Australia, the northwest of the United States, Canada and the Amazon rainforest will increase, this scientist maintains.
Although there are scientific studies that point to climate change as a factor fueling fires, the attribution to warming of fires is complex, because these are events in which there are quite a few variables to take into account. However, he managed to translate this relationship between warming and fire into figures: climate change increased the plant surface affected by fires by 15.8% between 2003 and 2019.
But the fires are only part of the big picture linked to a climate crisis caused by greenhouse gases whose damage will intensify starting in the summer with the appearance of The Child. It will arrive on an already overheated planet. For example, the ocean surface temperature last month was the second highest of those recorded for April, practically tied with the data for 2024, the maximum so far. At the same time, in the Arctic region the surface area occupied by sea ice was 5% below average, ranking as the second lowest for this month, slightly below the April record established in 2019, as Copernicus also reported in its latest climate bulletin.
Overall, last month was the third warmest April ever recorded on Earth on average — paleoclimatologists maintain . So far, the first and second place are occupied by 2024 and 2025 respectively. This concatenation is not a coincidence, it is simply the confirmation of a fact: the temperature on the planet’s surface is increasing due to the increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due mainly to fossil fuels.
The cyclical phenomenon of ‘El Niño’
Other factors are then added to this underlying trend, such as the natural and cyclical phenomenon of The Child. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has already warned that “between the months of May and July” it is likely “that conditions characteristic of an episode of “The Child”which will bring “higher-than-normal land surface temperatures to almost the entire planet.” Furthermore, the WMO warned that “it may be an intense episode”, although we will still have to wait a few weeks to refine this forecast.
The WMO explains that episodes of The Child They alter rainfall patterns in several regions of the planet—for example, it is associated with more extreme rainfall in some parts of South America—and generate warming of the global climate. “2024 was the warmest year on record due to the combination of the intense episode of The Child 2023/2024 and anthropogenic climate change caused by greenhouse gases”, the WMO detailed monitoring of this phenomenon.
